Posts Tagged ‘impeachment’

With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I’m still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven’t had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it’s a big compendium of more or less everything I’ve found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there’s just no way I can put everything I’ve looked at since August on here. So today’s format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn’t really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!

Here’s where I would like to propose a thought experiment. Fast forward 66m years. Imagine some intelligent life form arrives (or re-evolves) on earth. It wants to know: what “caused” the sixth great extinction? What are they likely to conclude from the available evidence? 9/

The popular scifi of the 21st century will be Americans sublimating their guilt by imagining themselves as victims, and the rest of the world sublimating the nightmare that is an actually-existing hostile, amoral entity antithetical to human life

* Mark Z. Danielewski has written a pilot for a potential House of Leaves TV series. It’s good! The question of adapting the novel wound up being a minor subtheme in our discussion of the book in my summer grad class last month, so I was gratified to actually get to see the script — and directly incorporating the novel into the storyworld of the TV series seems like an intriguing solution to the book’s basic unfilmability. I think I hope someone makes it!

So that's 50 kids matched and reunited in two weeks. At that pace we're looking at OVER TWO YEARS to match and reunite the approximately 3000 children in its custody that have been taken from their parents.

* There is too much uncertainty in sports; even if you bribe the officials, something unaccounted for could still cause the “wrong” result. It can be a bad idea to gather large crowds opposed to your team (and, by extension, your dictatorship). During Franco’s rule, Barcelona FC’s stadium was the only place the Catalans could wave their flag and sing their songs. Dictators are better off with tyranny and oppression. Football is for people who can accept a loss.

Seeking asylum is not illegal; it is a right guaranteed under international law. It’s the Trump administration that is acting illegally — by their own admission — by enacting punishments against asylum seekers. Everyone who is a party to this action is a criminal.

The US government chaotically shuffling thousands of children it has kidnapped from their parents through a series of inadequate temporary shelters has a small number of very predictable outcomes, all of them extremely terrible.

Time for that sad reminder. After Robin Williams' suicide, sensational media coverage that violated the CDC guidelines resulted in a 10 PERCENT increase in suicides. Same effect applies to mass shootings. Newsrooms, please be considerate in your coverage. https://t.co/O5Gy81rSP0

Republicans who claim the president can commit literally any crime without consequence either during (no indictments) or after (self-pardon) office are saying they do not consider this country a democracy + do not accept any limit other than their own will to power. Believe them!

Recent scrutiny of investment practices by the University of Michigan is raising concerns about conflicts of interest and ethical lapses at colleges and universities seeking to increase their endowments.

Questions about Michigan’s investment practices were prompted by an investigation by the Detroit Free Press, which found that a large portion of the university’s nearly $11 billion endowment is invested in private equity, hedge and venture capital funds, and real estate investment firms run by top university donors and alumni investment advisers.

* Below are the two main written versions of Sojourner’s speech, the original, on the left, was delivered at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio on May 29, 1851. The full text of each speech follows the synopsis below so you can see the differences line by line. I have highlighted overt similarities between the two versions. While Frances Gage changed most of the wording and added the southern slave dialect to her 1863 version, it is clear the origin of Gage’s speech comes from Sojourner’s original 1851 speech.

The first hints these elusive particles turned up decades ago. But after years of dedicated searches, scientists have been unable to find any other evidence for them, with many experiments contradicting those old results. These new results now leave scientists with two robust experiments that seem to demonstrate the existence of sterile neutrinos, even as other experiments continue to suggest sterile neutrinos don’t exist at all.

* The District of Columbia is considering legislation to lower the voting age to 16 (something some localities already allow for local elections only). Bills are pending in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico to lower the voting age to 17 for primary or general elections.

“We’re 100 percent committed to diversity…Marvel is the world outside your window and we want not only our characters but our creative talent to reflect that world and it hasn’t been an easy road to be honest with you. Going back to the 60s when Marvel were created it was created by a number of white men here in New York City who were working in our studio… But now, we do not have any artists that work in Marvel. All our writers and artists work — are freelancers that live around the world so our talent base has diversified almost more quickly than our character base has.”

we talk a lot about fascism on here, but a system where a small group of rich media personalities faint over the insults one member of the ruling class calls another while thousands of people in a colony die of deliberate neglect is just straight-up, like, Bourbon France

All of the essential admin at universities are engaged in some form of instructional work (student/faculty services, technology, libraries, etc.), or skilled technical and infrastructure work (cleaning, communication, maintenance). It's the presidents like this guy no one needs.

* “All of the theoretical work that’s been done since the 1970s has not produced a single successful prediction,” says Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. “That’s a very shocking state of affairs.”Say what you will about critical theory in the humanities, it’s predicted just about everything that’s happened since…

* The one thing that we can I think be sure of is that if we get a signal, we will know it’s an artificial signal [and not from an astronomical source]. And then we’ll know that we are not alone. Will we ever be able to understand it? I don’t know. The researchers who study alien linguistics.

#TheResistance becoming preoccupied with completely made-up fantasies about Melania while all reporting about Puerto Rico continues to be buried and ICE kidnaps children at the border sure feels like a metaphor for something.

American flag-waving obfuscates these and other abuses of power; reveals the state’s protection and definition of a white, hetero socioeconomic class as the legitimate citizen class at the expense of black, brown, Muslim, trans, disabled, or immigrant lives; and is our traditional response to a sense of foreign impingement on “normal American life” (white suburban families). The message goes: Don’t think about the President’s baseless claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, don’t think about the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning and, now, Reality Winner, don’t think about the dependence of all power on a disenfranchised, exploited class. Think instead of the firefighters at ground zero, who were certain that America would endure. Think of ordinary citizens, like those depicted in the “Main Street USA” ad, and their faith in this city on a hill. Think instead, “Make America Great Again!” Don’t ask: Who suffers in this society when the state makes better security and freedom for its populace a goal? Freedom for whom? Who does a Muslim ban serve? Who do police serve? On which caskets do we lay the flag?

* In 1975, Gary Gygax revealed the Tomb of Horrors module at the first Origins convention, presenting it as a campaign that would specifically challenge overpowered characters who would have to rely on their wits to outsmart incredibly lethal, subtle traps, rather than using their almighty THACOs to fell trash-mobs of orcs or other low-level monsters.

* A research question I’ve been pondering for awhile: When, exactly, did the idea that the President — and only the President — was in charge of the decision to use nuclear weapons get turned into real policy? Answer seems to be September 1948, with NSC-30.

* The people who buy into the idea of eugenics and racial supremacy—the alt-right and their fellow travellers—will sooner or later have to come to terms with the inevitability of anthropogenic climate change. Right now climate denialism is a touchstone of the American right, but the evidence is almost impossible to argue against right now and it’s increasingly obvious that many of the people who espouse disbelief are faking it—virtue signalling on the hard right. Sooner or later they’ll flip. When they do so, they will inevitably come to the sincere, deeply held belief that culling the bottom 50% to 90% of the planetary population will give them a shot at survival in the post-greenhouse world.Charlie Stross predicts the 21st century.

"So you know the climate change denier who's running NASA?""…Can we talk about how that's even a sentence?""The good news is, he did a complete 180 & now thinks climate change as real & man-made.""What's the bad news?""Whatever the fuck they showed him to change his mind!"

very late to this object lesson in how we normalize men screaming at women and encourage women to blame themselves for not getting over it quickly enough by calling the dynamic "family" and the screaming "art" and the whole package "love" https://t.co/fiV50tqQ4C

the nfl votes to fine players protesting social injustices on the same day that a police department releases footage of officers harassing and tasing an nba player who wasn't resisting arrest and there are still people who swear there's no problem

Worshippers clutching AR-15 rifles and some wearing bullet crowns, participated in a commitment ceremony today at World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, in Newfoundland, Pa. The event led a nearby school to cancel classes for the day. Photos @jacquelinelarmapic.twitter.com/GXzrZeK41z

But of course so long as this same Republican Party remains itself pro-corporate in its economic ideology — as the Trumpified G.O.P., despite his populist forays, has determinedly remained — the corporate interests themselves stand to lose little from these polarizing trends. Their wokeness buys them cover when liberalism is in power, and any backlash only helps prop up a G.O.P. that has their back when it comes time to write our tax laws.